All bound for “morning town” many miles away…..
Ernest Hemmingway once said “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
When I was a nurse it was expected that we did shift work. For many years I slept when the sun was bright and worked very hard throughout the night only to do a morning shift the next day. I was lucky I thought, I could sleep anywhere, anytime but looking back on the photos it was clear that the person attempting to smile back looked as if she needed a good long nap!
Sleep is one of the few things that is crucial to life and yet it is left to the person on how to regulate it independently. The amount of sleep required by adults is slightly longer than 8 hours but due to a very recent study called “Sleep: A Global Perspective” it was discovered that 61% of people in the UK felt they needed seven to nine hours each night to be at their most productive. In contrast, another study investigated the risk to night shift workers operating through the small hours of the night can throw the body 'into chaos' even causing long-term damage.
Serious business so what can happen when we don’t get enough sleep regularly?
Your complexion suffers because everyone needs beauty sleep. Recent research found that sleep-deprived women suffer premature skin aging and a decrease in the skin's ability to recover after exposure to the sun - signs include fine lines, uneven pigmentation, slackening of skin, and reduced elasticity.
You cannot think straight (what?) - Poor sleep reduces the ability to make decisions and increases the risk of making mistakes. We may also suffer a loss of memory and any routine tasks involving problem solving and time management skills will become even more difficult to carry out.
A lack of quality sleep can lead to stress which means the body makes more of the stress hormone, cortisol, and this will increase inflammation.
Feeling uninspired, tired, weepy and short-tempered? - To function properly and efficiently, the brain needs us to sleep so it can reorder thought processes and assess the day's events and our experiences of them.
You're hungry - and piling on the weight? If the brain is not getting the energy it needs from sleep, it will often try to get it from food. Scientists also found that just four and a half hours of sleep for four days straight can reduce our fat cells' ability to respond to insulin (the hormone responsible for regulating energy) by 30%.
You are impulsive - We have all had those moments of impulse buys and desires. Think about it - did you find yourself online buying lots of products you didn’t need late at night?
So, give it a go! Promise yourself in 2024 to re-introduce “sleep”. No join-up fees, no deliveries, no sign-ups!